The purpose of reliability analysis (RA) is to build, assess the performance of, and continually improve maintenance policies. By a “maintenance policy” we mean a rule or process to be used for decision support. Why do we need policies? We need them because it would be inefficient to always have to evaluate repetitive maintenance situations from first principles. Rather, a policy, also called a “model” or “decision model” will have been developed to:
- identify a situation from available information, and
- suggest an optimal action
- periodically self assess overall (model) performance in terms of having fulfilled its organizational objectives.
Reliability analysts, as their principal role, test, validate, and report the performance of decision models. Then, based on evidence, they describe, propose, and justify new or revised policies.
© 2011, Murray Wiseman. All rights reserved.